I find it relatively easy to use YouTube without exposing myself to their recommendations (not that they're ever particularly good, in my experience).

My bookmark for YouTube is directly to my subscriptions, and it's also possible to create a android shortcut link directly to subscriptions. Occasionally, a flow will direct me to the homepage, but that's rare and I usually organically bounce back to my subs without even thinking about it.

There's always recs below a video, but again, those are rarely very interesting to me or they're things I've subscribed to anyway.